Cruel loss of ‘nicest person you could meet’
FAMILY’S HEARTACHE AT DEATH OF MUM AGED JUST 35
‘KIND, loving and big-hearted,’ Kelly Gibbinson was devoted to her children and to her close family and friends.
But her loved ones were forced to watch helplessly as a cruel disease robbed the mum of five of her bubbly personality before it took her life when she was just 35 years old.
The horror started in November last year, when Kelly, from Choppington , Northumberland, was on the school run.
Sister Amy Wilson, 24, said: “She was taking her son to school one day she was fine, and then all of a sudden she was rolling around on the ground in agony. Her belly started to blow up like a watermelon. She was in so much pain, she thought she was dying.”
A scan at the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital revealed Kelly, who had suffered from a hernia in 2009 and had been concerned for a few months the problem might have returned, needed surgery for a hernia which was obstructing her bowel.
Kelly needed a special dressing to treat the open surgery wound after a stay in intensive care, but was able to return home with nurses visiting to tend the wound. Her loved ones expected her to get better - but instead, the family watched as Kelly got weaker and weaker, seemingly without explanation.
Amy said: “She would be in and out of the doctor’s, to the hospital, they would hook her up to a drip and she would seem better, she’d last a few days and then be poorly again, it just kept repeating itself and she wasn’t getting better, she was just lying in a bed in the sitting room, living like an old woman at 35.
“We thought it was the wound that was making her ill, draining her strength. She was dying in front of us and we didn’t know why.
“When she heard I was having a girl she was so excited. But by the time my daughter, Ayda Rose, was born, she was so ill she was only ever able to meet her niece once, from her bed, she was too weak to hold her.”
In April, things hit crisis point and Kelly was rushed back to hospital, hallucinating and confused, where doctors discovered Kelly’s liver was failing, alongside problems with her kidneys and sepsis in her mouth. She was given just a 50% chance of survival. Despite a few days were Kelly seemed to be getting better, she fell into a coma from which she never recovered, dying of acute hepatic liver failure on April 24.
She left behind daughters Brooke, 18 and Morgan, 14, and sons Lennon, 16, Harvey, 12, and Mason, seven, and their dad Craig Gibbinson, 45.
“Brooke is doing amazing, being a mother figure to the other kids,” Amy said.
“Constantly making sure she does her best by them even though she’s